Comment by michael1999 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by michael1999 | Hacker News Reader

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I'd refine Doctorow's claims to "Privacy preserving age verification is bullshit in the Common Law Anglo world".

You are completely correct that civil law jurisdictions have already solved this: Germany, Estonia, and many others have the all the requirements: a register of all persons available to the central authority, and crypto infrastructure to make it work.

What's missing from the UK, Canada, USA, etc. is the first part! It is hard to believe if you live in Germany, but there really is no big master list of people in those countries. There are many (many, many) lists, linked badly by many different ids. The tax registry, pension registry, drivers license registry, and visa registry are some of the big ones.

Things could be so much simpler if we had such a thing, but the politics between here and there are basically impossible.

Those big (computerised) master lists were really useful for the Holocaust: I'm not sure it's a bad thing that some countries don't have them.

Unfortunately the countries that don't have them, still have them.

Your birth certificate is still stored somewhere. You're still entered in a bunch of databases from the moment you're given birth to in a hospital. You still get a social security number, which you need to work, which you need to do to afford food.

Sure, all those databases might not have a neat shared primary key, but that's definitely not going to stop future Holocaust 2.0 perpetrators from joining all those tables together.

Slowing them down might be enough.

Didn't we have a recent example with DOGE ?

Slightly different spellings of names (Ant Mars Smith vs Mark Tony Smith-Jones), ways to write addresses (house name vs road name), etc will make automatic joins difficult. Such inconsistencies do not significantly affect the ability for humans to use the records.

Then it's just a matter of making sure that everybody with the skills to do so, either refuses, or does a bad enough job to sabotage other parts of the process. (It is not hard to think of these, so I will not discuss them here.) Making the job legitimately difficult makes it easier for people to refuse to do it, and makes it more likely that the bad guys who try will find that they actually can't.

If you think the NSA didn't build this during Pointdexter's TIA program, I don't know that to tell you.

The USA 100% has this, it's just secret and much less useful for it. The SSA is 95% there.

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